Originally Posted by
Harry Wayfarers
I don't really see the point except for showing off, the A380 seems to be the perfect equipment for the LON/OZ air bridge, give it a few years and A380's shall be as cheap as chips and by the time they are past their use-by dates there shall be a whole new generation of aircraft about, the likes of CX have recently started direct services MAN/HKG with A350's when previously they only served LON, so I can see that a MAN/SYD service might work but without any necessity to be non-stop, many Aussies take their holidays in Asia thus why QF utilise different Asian intermediary points and any travel agent search engine shall identify just how many carriers and options there already are serving the Oz routes.
And just what is the endurance of a fully laden QF B787 with, let's say, each pax with 20kg of baggage, above the 20.5 hours block times, holding fuel, one hour to alternate, 5% contingency etc. just how much more fuel can they possibly put on?
It's 30 years ago that I worked in Oz, these B787's are going to be planning from +24H weather forecasts, 30 years ago if the alternate had, let's say, a PROB30 of TS then they would need an alternate for the alternate etc. One day with a B737-300 we needed so many alternates that we had to offload pax just to get enough fuel on for a one hour flight, what chance from LON?
These 787 flights are purely to examine the effects of a 20+ hour flight on the human body and most especially on their crews. If project sunrise ever goes ahead, it’ll be on either the 777X or the soon to be announced A35KULR.